UK e-commerce explosion
According to another Nielsen report called the e-commerce landscape report, e-commerce in the UK is ‘booming'. It found that more than 8 in 10 of the UK's 31.6m active web surfers visited at least one of the UK's top 200 e-commerce sites in August 2010.
More importantly the survey discovered that 16 percent of shopping visits ended in a purchase, with 89 million transactions resulting from the month's 546 million shopping visits.
Conversion rates for the top 200 sites were all over 15 percent from Domino's Pizza, Amazon, Interflora and QVC. The report found ‘catalogue clothing sites' like Next, Freemans and Kaleidoscope were all had ‘strong' conversion rates of between 9 and 15 percent, whereas supermarkets didn't do quite so well.
Perhaps unsurprisingly it also found that when it comes to spending, the most lucrative e-commerce category is electronic equipment.
"On average, respondents from our sample of 8,500 Britons spent more on electronic goods - £156 each - than on any other category in August," it said.
Amazon, which was visited by 36 percent of people shopping for electrical equipment was the most successful retailer in the tech category. Of all the online shops eBay is the most popular in the UK with 17.7m unique visitors in August, putting it ahead of Amazon, Apple, Tesco and Argos.
Brits said their main reason for shunning the high street and shopping online was ‘cheaper prices'. Around 57 percent of people said price was the key reason, while for 32 percent of busy people it was the ‘ability to shop at any time' while a seemingly unsociable 29 percent said they shopped online to avoid having to ‘deal with sales staff'.
Here's a spending chart from Nielsen.
